_Makes Conscience a mere Sentiment._--It will be perceived that this theory, which is indebted chiefly to Mackintosh for its completeness, and scientific form, makes conscience wholly a matter of sentiment and feeling; standing in this respect, on the same ground with the theory of a special sense, and liable, in part, to the same objections. Hence the name _sentimental_ school, often employed to designate, collectively, the adherents of each of these views. While the theory, now proposed, might seem then to offer a plausible account of the manner in which our moral _sentiments_ arise, it does not account for the origin of our _ideas_ and _perceptions_ of moral rectitude. Now the moral faculty is not a mere sentiment. There is an intellectual perception of one thing as right, and another as wrong; and the question now before us is, Whence comes that perception, and the idea on which it is based? To resolve the whole matter into certain transferred and associated emotions, is to give up the inherent distinction of right and wrong as qualities of actions, and make virtue and vice creations of the sensibility, the play and product of the excited feelings. To admit the perception and idea of the right, and ascribe their origin to antecedent emotion, is, moreover, to reverse the natural order and law of psychological operation, which bases emotion on perception, and not perception on emotion. We do not first admire, love, hate, and then perceive, but the reverse. _Further Objections._--The view now under consideration, while it seems to resolve the moral faculty into mere feeling, thus making morality wholly a relative affair, makes conscience, itself, an acquired, rather than a natural faculty, a secondary process, a transformation of emotions, rather than itself an original principle. It does it, moreover, the further injustice of deriving its origin from the purely _selfish_ principles of our nature. I receive a favor, or an injury; hence I regard, with certain feelings of complacency, or the opposite, the man who has thus treated me. These feelings I come gradually to transfer to, and associate with, the act in itself considered, and this with other acts of the same nature; and so, at last, I come to have a moral faculty, and pronounce one thing right, and another wrong. _At Variance with Facts._--This view is quite inadmissible; at variance with facts, and the well-known laws of the human mind. The moral faculty is one of the earliest to develop itself. It appears in childhood, manifesting itself, not as an acquired and secondary principle, the result of a complicated process of associated and transferred emotion, requiring time for its gradual formation and growth, but rather as an original instinctive principle of nature.